'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Public libraries

The public library is
a part of these invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only
once they begin to disappear. A utopian dream - about the place from which every
human being will have access to every piece of available knowledge that can be
collected - looked impossible for a long time, until the egalitarian impetus
of social revolutions, the Enlightenment idea of universality of knowledge, and
the exceptional suspension of the commercial barriers to access to knowledge
made it possible. The Internet has... completely
changed our expectations and imagination about what is possible. The dream of a
catalogue of the world – a universal approach to all available
knowledge for every member of society – became realizable.

Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, Monoskop,
UbuWeb are all examples of fragile knowledge infrastructures built and
maintained by brave librarians practicing civil disobedience which the world of
researchers in the humanities rely on. These projects are re-inventing the
public library in the gap left by today’s institutions in crisis...

In What Was
Revolutionary about the French Revolution? Robert Darnton considers how a
complete collapse of the social order (when absolutely everything - all
social values - is turned upside down) would look. Such trauma
happens often in the life of individuals but only rarely on the level of an
entire society. In 1789 the French
had to confront the collapse of a whole social order—the world that they
defined retrospectively as the Ancien Régime—and to find some new order in the
chaos surrounding them. They experienced reality as something that could be
destroyed and reconstructed, and they faced seemingly limitless possibilities,
both for good and evil, for raising a utopia and for falling back into tyranny.

The revolution
bootstraps itself. In the dictionaries of
the time, the word revolution was said to derive from the
verb to revolve and was defined as “the return of the planet or a
star to the same point from which it parted.” French political vocabulary
spread no further than the narrow circle of the feudal elite in Versailles. The
citizens, revolutionaries, had to invent new words, concepts . . . an entire
new language in order to describe the revolution that had taken place.

They began with the
vocabulary of time and space. In the French revolutionary calendar used from
1793 until 1805, time started on 1 Vendémiaire, Year 1, a date
which marked the abolition of the old monarchy on (the Gregorian equivalent) 22
September 1792. With a decree in 1795, the metric system was adopted. As with
the adoption of the new calendar, this was an attempt to organize space in a
rational and natural way. Gram became a unit of mass.

In Paris, 1,400
streets were given new names. Every reminder of the tyranny of the monarchy was
erased. The revolutionaries even changed their names and surnames. Le Roy or
Leveque, commonly used until then, were changed to Le Loi or Liberté. To address someone, out of respect, with vouswas forbidden by
a resolution passed on 24 Brumaire, Year 2. Vous was replaced with tu. People are equal. The watchwords Liberté, égalité,
fraternité (freedom,
equality, brotherhood) were built through literacy, new epistemologies,
classifications, declarations, standards, reason, and rationality.